Can the UN survive Bush's onslaught?

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Too little has been learned from the cataclysm that befell the UN in Iraq a year ago.

Even before that awful bomb ripped through our Baghdad headquarters on August 19, 2003, taking the lives of 22 of my colleagues, the United Nations mission in Iraq had become marginal to the epic crisis being played out there. Iraq had become the centre of both the US war on terror and the war between the extremities of two civilisations.

The vicious terrorist attack a year ago surprised no one working for Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN Secretary-General's special representative. Indeed, the UN chiefs of communication in Iraq had met that morning to hammer out a plan to counter the intensifying perception among Iraqis that our mission was simply an adjunct of the US occupation.

Little did the Iraqis know that the reality was quite the opposite: by August, the UN mission had grown very distant from the Americans. The intense early relationship that Sergio, the world's most brilliant negotiator of post-conflict crises, had fashioned with Paul Bremer, the US proconsul, had already fractured. Contact was intermittent now that Bremer's coalition provisional authority (CPA) could deal directly with the Iraqis whom it had appointed, with Sergio's help, to the governing council.

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General dismay over occupation tactics aside, Sergio had already parted company with Bremer over key issues such as the need for electoral affirmation of a new constitution, and the arrest and conditions of the thousands imprisoned at Abu Ghraib prison.

The low point came at the end of July last year, when, astonishingly, the US blocked the creation of a fully fledged UN mission in Iraq. Clearly, the Bush Administration had eagerly sought a UN presence in occupied Iraq as a legitimising factor rather than as a partner that could mediate the occupation's early end.

Sergio had nevertheless continued to squeeze whatever mileage he could from what he called the "constructive ambiguity" of a terrible postwar Security Council resolution; one that sent UN staff into the Iraqi cauldron without giving them even a minimal level of independence or authority. It is not an exaggeration to say that it was this resolution that rang the death knell for the UN in Iraq.

Having heroically resisted American pressure to authorise the war, Security Council members decided to show goodwill to the "victors". "A step too far" was how an Iraqi put it to me on my second day in Baghdad.

He said that even those who had grown accustomed to the double standards the Security Council employed in punishing Iraqis for the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, while acquiescing to a quarter-century of Israeli occupation of Arab lands, were horrified that it could legitimise an unprovoked war that the entire world had clamorously opposed. Many Iraqis were also furious that the UN did not raise its voice against brutal occupation tactics, unaware that custom and diplomacy dictated that UN officials say little in public that would offend the world's most powerful state.

But by mid-August, a restless and discouraged Sergio had begun to breach the protocol. Two days before the bombing, he told a Brazilian journalist that Iraqis felt humiliated by the occupation, asking him how Brazilians would feel if foreign tanks were patrolling Rio de Janeiro's thoroughfares.

And on the day of the bombing, Sergio was going to issue a statement criticising the killing by US soldiers of the Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana as he filmed an incident outside Abu Ghraib prison. That statement saved my life. Sergio asked me to add additional information about other unlawful killings, which made me miss the 4pm meeting that was the target of that attack. Six of the seven participants were killed, and the seventh lost both legs and an arm.

August 19, 2003, is a pivotal moment in UN history, not merely because of the unprecedented viciousness of the attack, but because of the lack of an Iraqi, Arab and Muslim outcry over the atrocity. This near silence exposed the depths to which the organisation's standing had sunk in the Middle East as a result of its inability to contain or even condemn the militaristic excesses of US and Israeli policies in the post-September 11 period.

While the Security Council's double standards over the Middle East are the principal cause of Arab and Muslim hostility, America's ability to pressure UN heads to toe the line is also a vexing problem. On the question of the need for a democratically elected interim government of Iraq and, more recently, the composition of the interim government, it has looked as if the UN has buckled to US pressure again.

The Bush Administration puts relentless pressure on countries to support even the most questionable aspects of its war on terror, regardless of the damage such support might do to their stability.

A perfect example is the drive to get a UN mission operational in Iraq under the protection of forces from Muslim countries. Such a presence would pose excruciating risks to both the UN and any countries that comply, notably Pakistan and Saudi Arabia; but such is US power that its "persuasion" might succeed.

Little seems to have been learned from the cataclysm that befell the UN a year ago.

The UN is precious - not because of its name, but because it struggles, however imperfectly, to reach global consensus on the world's critical issues. The fanatics who blew up the UN mission dealt a severe blow to its fortunes in the Middle East.

But more lasting damage is being done to the legitimacy of this irreplaceable institution by demands to obey US dictates. If it continues to bow to pressure, its capital will be squandered and its resolutions rendered weightless for large chunks of humanity.

Member states and the Secretary-General should see this eroding legitimacy as the greatest challenge the organisation faces.

But they will be unable to make effective headway unless the US itself recognises that it needs, in its own interest, to show greater respect for the UN, from which it can learn to define and pursue its own interests more wisely.

Salim Lone was director of communications for the UN mission in Iraq headed by the late Sergio Vieira de Mello. This article first appeared in The Guardian, London.